Frequently Asked Questions (FAQs)

This set of questions is either fairly general or doesn't fit into the How Do I categories. If you don't see your question here, check out the How Do I page. If you want a question added to this list or the How Do I list, send an email to the users@help.kenai.com mailing list.

What is Project Kenai?

Project Kenai is a connected developer destination where developers can host open source projects, as well as connect, communicate, and collaborate with developers of like mind. There's a quick overview at The Nuts & Bolts of Project Kenai.

How do I get started?

Anyone can sign up as a member and get involved with existing projects. If you have an SDN (Sun Developer Network) login, you can use it here. To host a project, simply click the Request Project Creation button you see on your My Page.

How does Project Kenai stack up to the competition?

How do I get more help?

Click the Help link at the top of any page, or go to the How Do I? page for a more detailed list of questions.

Why am I getting errors when I try to sign up?

If you're trying to sign up and see the error message, "DUPLICATE_USERNAME: Username already exists in registry," there could be two causes:

You entered a Sun Developer Network (SDN) username and password on the Sign Up page. SDN members don't need to create a new account. Just exit the Sign Up page and login with your SDN username and password.

You don't have an SDN username, but you're still seeing the error message. In this case, you've entered a username that's already being used by another user. Try entering a different username.

How do I report a problem or bug?

If you're familiar with JIRA, you can create a bug report at http://kenai.com/jira/browse/KENAI. You can also report bugs on the Project Kenai Bugs forum at http://kenai.com/projects/help/forums/bugs. When you report a bug, please make sure you always include the Project Kenai revision number in the post. The current revision number can be found at the bottom right of every page on the site, just after the Copyright notice. It also helps if you provide as many details and reproduction steps as possible, and your operating system and browser and their versions can be helpful as well.

How do I create a project?

Go to either My Page or the Projects page, where you click the CREATE PROJECTS button. For more information, see Creating a Project.

How do I set up my project?

How do I hide my project's content?

Any Project Kenai member can join your project as an observer by bookmarking it. So, if you want only people that you choose to see your project content, give all these invited project members a role with more privilege than Observer, like Content Developer or Software Developer, as described at Members Tab. Next, you set up each of your project features, like the email lists, the wiki, and the source code repository, to be visible only to members with a role higher than Observer. For example, to set up role permissions for your project mailing lists, see Setting Role Permissions under Mailing Lists. That page describes how to set role permissions for all your project's features—just scroll down to see how to set role permissions for other features.

How can I create more projects after I've used up my Create Projects quota?

After you've created all the projects allocated to you, the CREATE PROJECTS button on your My Page changes to a REQUEST PROJECT CREATION button. Click this button, fill out the form, and click Send Request. For more information, see Requesting More Projects.

How do I find projects?

The Project Kenai home page has a list of featured projects at the bottom of the page. This is a place to start. To look for more projects you might be interested in, click the Projects tab to go to the Projects page, where you can:

Page through the alphabetical list of projects.

Browse the projects on the Most Recent Projects tab.

Use the project search field to find projects by name.

Use the filtered list of project tags in the left navbar to find projects by type, such as jruby. If you want to see the entire tag cloud, click All Tags at the top of the tag list.

When you find a project that sounds interesting, click the project name to go to its home page, and then you can read its wiki, forums, and email archives, view its source code, and download builds to try them out. If you like the project and think you might like to participate, the next step is to join as an observer. See the next question for more information about joining a project.

How do I join a project?

If you want to get involved with a project, first bookmark the project, then get involved on its forums, email lists, and bug tracker.

You can click Bookmark This Project on any project's home page and become a project member with limited observer status. The project and its most recent forum posts will then show up on your My Page, and your registration will be visible to other members of the project when they click the number to the right of Members: on the project home page. Some projects also prevent nonmembers from accessing project features like downloads and source code, so you have to become an observer to use these project features.

If you want to get involved as a developer, first sign up as an observer, and then start connecting with other members of the project in the project's forums or mailing lists. Get to know how the project is being worked or managed. Once you get to know everyone, ask one of the project administrators for a higher role in the project like Software Developer or Content Developer.

How do I contact other Kenai members?

Every Kenai member gets an email alias based on their username, username@kenai.com. If you find someone you'd like to contact, send them email at their username address, and it will be forwarded to their real email account. For example, a Project Kenai member with username kzxx has the email alias kzxx@kenai.com.

How do I invite others to join my project?

There's currently no automated way to send out emails to all the folks you want to invite to join your project. You have to create and send that email yourself.

Hint: If you want to find and invite Project Kenai members, you can go the People page and either look through the list, use the search field (for example, to find a friend by name), or use the tag cloud on the left. When you find a member you'd like to invite, use their Project Kenai email to contact them: username@kenai.com

After friends who aren't Project Kenai members get the email, here's what they do:

Sign up for an account on kenai.com.

Send email to you with the username they used when signing up.

You can then open your project page, click Manage This Project, and, on the Members tab, add them to your project and give them appropriate roles in the project. For more information, see Managing a Project: Members Tab.

Why can't I enter a member's username when I add a member to my project?

If you're adding a member to your project (as described at Managing a Project: Members Tab) and you're having trouble getting the name to stay in the field, or you get errors about not being able to save the role because "Person is blank", it's because the auto-lookup on the Username field is working too slowly. Until we get it to work better, the workaround is to type slowly and wait for the field to update so you can select the username you want to add.

How do I delete my project?

If you're the person who created the project, and there are no other members in your project, you can delete the project yourself by going to the Settings tab under Project Admin. and clicking on the Delete button at the bottom of the page.

Note: If your project has members other than yourself, before you can deleted the project, you must remove the members from the project. Be sure to email your project members and make an announcement on the main forum so they aren't surprised when the project disappears. You might also want to give them enough time to save their work elsewhere, and if the project is moving somewhere else, consider creating it there first and giving them time to start contributing at the new location.

If you run into any problems, please send an email to Kenai-Admin@Sun.COM and request that the project be deleted.

Can I subscribe to an RSS feed for a forum thread?

Yes, RSS feeds are available for forum threads. When you click a forum thread, the RSS feed button appears in the web browser's address bar or toolbar, depending on which browser your're using. More ...

How do I display Javadoc for my project?

Why can't I see my project's mailing list administration options?

You have to be the project owner, the original creator of the project, to be able to see the project's mailing list administration options (Compose Message, Moderate List, View List Subscribers, and Manage List). We are working on a fix that will allow any administrator of a project to administer the project's mailing lists.

I'm an administrator of a mailing list and want to manage my list's members, but there are a lot of them. How can I see more mailing list members per page than the default 10 members?

The short answer is to add ?size=100 or ?size=150 to the URL for the member list. Here are the steps:

Open your My Page and scroll to the project whose mailing list you want manage.

Click Mailing Lists in the list of features to the right of the project information.

Scroll to the list you want to manage and click View List Subscribers.

When the page opens, go to the browser address field and add ?size=100 or ?size=150 to the URL, then press Enter.

Your member lists will now show 100 or 150 members per page, depending on the number you used.

When you change your email address in your Profile Settings (as described here), two emails are sent out: one to your old email address notifying you that this change was made to your profile, and a verification email to your new email address with a link to activate the new address. When you click the link and verify the new address on kenai.com, it shows up in your profile.

When you change what your users can do with one of your source control repositories (as described here), because of the way we cache this information, it takes a while for the changes to propagate. Give your changes 15 to 30 minutes to take effect.

When I use Adium to connect to a chat room, why do I get a Verify Certificate message window?

How can I do large pushes to my Mercurial repository without timing out?

When doing a push to your Mercurial repository, if you get messages like, "abort: error: Software caused connection abort", your push has timed out. Instead of using HTTPS protocol, use SSH to do your updates. Not only is SSH more secure, but it is faster. Before using SSH with Project Kenai, you have to generate an SSH key pair and save the public key to the SSH Keys tab in your user profile. For more information on generating SSH keys, see Generating an SSH Key.

Why does my email address show up in my project's source code repository?

Git and Mercurial require an email address when you check code in, and they store the email in the repository. You can change your email address in your Git or Mercurial preferences to one that you don't mind sharing. For example, you could set your email to your-username@kenai.com, or you could use a temporary alias.

Why doesn't a search in Jira default to my current project?

Jira by default searches all projects in Project Kenai when you search for bugs. You can pick your project from the list of projects to limit the projects Jira searches. You then save that search as a filter and resuse it for subsequent searches.

Project Kenai vs. Java.net?

Let's start by saying that Project Kenai, while in beta mode, is fully functional. There's still a long list of additional features we'll be bringing online. Once we believe we're feature rich, we may pull the "Beta" tag. Stay tuned for what new features are coming down the road!

Now, onto the question at hand: Project Kenai vs. Java.net? Several years ago Sun was looking to provide a "place" where developers passionate about Java technology could interact. This idea became Java.net, a place leveraging a 3rd party infrastructure for the collaboration/hosting features.

In that time, technology has been moving at the speed of light, often times in areas outside of Java. The question for Sun became, "What can we offer to developers using new languages/new technologies in regards to hosting projects and collaboration, as well as ourselves participate in this new ecosystem that falls outside of Java?" The answer is Project Kenai. It allows developers using ANY language a place to host their open source project. Also, since we've created the infrastructure, we can be much more agile with what new features/services we offer to Kenai members.

At the end of the day, it's all about your own personal choices. Java.net is still a very useful destination for parties interested in accelerating the advancement of Java. I'd suggest taking a look at the features that Project Kenai and Java.net offer to determine which one fits YOUR needs.